THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE the world, and there is no reason to suppose that she was in any way exceptional Nearer the coast there was more alarm, and Hardy, both in The Trumpet-Major and The Dynasts, has shown how the shadow of a French landing hung over his own county of Dorset. When Napoleon assembled the granie armee^ 115,000 strong, at Boulogne the threat of invasion became very real indeed, and it was not rendered any less deadly by the lack of an adequate defensive organization on this side of the Channel. The coasts had never been properly fortified since the days of Henry VIII, and that monarch's old castles were still being patched up from time to time. Various ports, such as Plymouth, Portsmouth, Sheerness, and Harwich, had received attention under Charles II, and additional fortifications had been added at intervals in the reigns of Anne and the first two Georges, but there was no systematic enceinte of earthworks at any British port before 1860. When war broke out in 1793 the Mayor and Corporation of each borough were still theoretically responsible for its defence. As the "Army of England" began to be marshalled opposite Dover, defensive plans, many of them based on those of 1588, were hastily put into operation. Martello towers appeared at the more exposed points along the coast, and beacons ready for firing were placed on all the heights. Some- times these were lighted by mistake, and a hasty mobiliza- tion was the result. Scott describes one such case in The Antiquary, and in the notes to that work he relates the readiness with which the Selkirkshire Yeomanry mustered on February 2nd, 1804, when a false alarm was given from Home Castle. In Dorset the news of a French landing became so frequent that it began to pall: as one of Hardy's characters put it: 15 213